6 Questions That Get You to Destiny

Do you have a destiny? Or is God more hands-off with your life, leaving you to figure it out? It’s an important question. If God has a plan for your life, then you can wake up every day seeking to live your life on purpose.

Scripture & destiny

We see in Scripture God saying, “I know the plans I have for you.” (Jer. 29:11) And it makes sense that an all-knowing and personal God would have plans for us. This idea of destiny is embedded in the popular imagination and even our national history. Our country has been built around the concept of “manifest destiny.”

Whether we trust God to lead us or not, believing that we’re special and that he has a plan takes some of the angst of modern life away. We know that our lives were designed, not an accident of nature.

We read that “we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”  (Eph. 2:10) And that sounds like good news. Life is complicated and filled with hard things. Often we struggle to find our way. We suspect that we have a destiny, but we don’t know how to get there. It can feel like we’re looking for a hidden treasure map.

Yet while the idea of destiny may be part of our zeitgeist, there isn’t scriptural support for the notion of a treasure map per se. There is not some divine game plan that we have to guess at or be fearful of missing.

6 questions

That said, there are some questions that can help us cut through our confusion and clarify our destiny. I have been asking myself these questions for years, but recently I’ve seen that the priority in which they are asked and answered is as important as the questions themselves.

In other words, by skipping a question, I can get ahead of myself and miss God’s guidance. If I haven’t wrestled with the first question and have skipped ahead, I will always have identity issues and will try to answer the “who am I?” question with the answers to the other questions.

1. WHO?    Who am I?

2. WHY?    What is my purpose?

3. HOW?    How will I accomplish it?

4. WHAT?  What is my plan?

5. WHO WITH?   Who are my teammates?

6. WHERE?   Where will we go?

Prioritizing the questions

To understand the priority of the following six questions, it may be helpful to look at the lives of some key figures in the Bible. For example, Paul. When Jesus confronted him on the road to Damascus, he talked to Paul about who he was first. He confronted Paul on his mistaken identity and told him what his purpose and plan was. (Acts 26)

Paul later learned the specifics of the plan and who his teammates were. He wasn’t even clued into his destination until once he had gotten started on his road to walking out his destiny.

This underscores the fact that Jesus is much more interested in who we are than what we do. And when it’s time to do something together, he’s more interested in our dependence on him than in the quality of our plan.

Other heroes of the faith were similar. Look at Moses, Joseph, or David. They had to struggle with identity before they were in a place where they wouldn’t confuse their assignment with who they were.

And even then, the details of how, what, and where were not revealed. God didn’t want to undermine their dependence on him, so he revealed the details later, often on a daily or moment-by-moment basis. In dependence, we get to deep trust, and that in turn gets us to the intimacy that we were made for and that God so wants to give us.

Yes, God has a plan for your life. And it begins with understanding who you are as a son or daughter of the king before he tells you how he expects you to steward his inheritance.

Have you asked these six questions? Do you ever want to skip over the hard ones and move on? Recognize that God has a plan, but at the center of it is a process of dependence that leads us to intimacy.